Beth Moore Simulcast

[Jerry Carter]

Our church is a remote hosting site for the Beth Moore simulcast in February. This event is hosted by CCN (Church Communication Network). I feel we can handle getting everything connected after their equipment arrives, but I was wondering if anyone else has hosted a live simulcast before - especially with CCN. I'm curious as to what equipment to expect, etc.

Of course, the fun part is that I work a full-time job outside of the church, and you just know the stuff is going to come in on a weekday, during business hours. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! (Need I say more?)

[Nathan J]

I have. We have had no issues except audio dropping out (multi-site simulcast and the engineers were slow to unmute the presenter's mics ).

[David Robinson]

Seems like they could email a list of equipment to you so you can preplan and verify how you want to interconnect components or if you need something special. They should be able to walk you thru it before the gear arrives to calm your anxiety some.
Hope all goes well.D'Ro

[Nathan J]

It will just be a "set top" satellite receiver that plugs (via coax) into the dish. There's really not that much to it.

Note: I'd strongly recommend getting a small monitor (if you don't have one already) so you can monitor the signal should you need to switch off it (simulcasts may have places for worship/prayer/pastor's greeting/etc) -- you should monitor the feed at all times, in the event of problems you can be sure it's on their end and not yours.

[Carl Godsoe]

We did this several years ago. The "dish" that ccn furnished didn't work at all. (It's an Alaska problem, I'm told. We are too far north for the 18" dish to work.) We had to have a much larger dish (3-4') installed and tuned by a local satelite TV outfit. Other than that it was OK.

The set-top receiver looks just like any other cable or sattelite TV receiver, and pretty much works just like what you would have at home. The small TV monitor as Nathan suggested is pretty much a necessity IMHO, and does not come with the equipment furnished by ccn.

[CCCLights]

I would have to echo everyone else.. as for equipment installation CCN paid for it to be done by some local installers... a dish on the roof and a set top box in the video suite.. we have done many simulcasts from CCN, most of the time everything is good, but it seems to me that the Beth Moore events always have issues with audio.

--Chuck--

[BradPowers]

We have hosted a Beth Moore Simulcast through CCN, and we're just up the road from you in Jackson. It was a simple setup, and we had no problems. I do recall there being an audio issue, though I think it was on the broadcast end. The event went well. We are also hosting this one coming up in February. I am heading out on a mission trip in February, and will get back in the country just 3 days before the simulcast. Praying that there are no issues.

[mediaguru]

We just hosted the Maximum Impact Simulcast 2008 and the first two hours was a technical nightmare! We had a room full of attendees and the signal kept freezing. We started with resetting the receiver - no help. Next step was to shutdown and analyze the signal strength. The signal strength was good so the next step was to replace the receiver. After spending a half hour setting it up we were back on. We had a couple of clitches after that but nothing like the morning.

I have to say that I am very hesitant to do another simulcast. Wouldn't you know... our Women's Ministry is wanting to do the Beth Moore Simulcast in August. We have Dish network as a provider. The support was ok but very frustrating that we had the problem during the simulcast.

[Sysmom]

We have shown several of the Foursquare Simulcasts through our CCN dish - and the only trouble we have had were ...

1. People *thoughtfully* unhooked and re-arranged our video cables (our issue, not theirs)

2. Incoming audio snafu on the studio end

We rehearsed it the first time and now I just test it out about a week ahead of time before we need it.

There's an incredible array of programs available to CCN subscribers, we've yet to find a leader of a group interested in doing them though.

deb

[mediaguru]

Thanks Deb. I appreciate your comments. It certainly was a learning experience but I might hyper ventilate the next time!

[Sysmom]

Originally Posted by mediaguru

Thanks Deb. I appreciate your comments. It certainly was a learning experience but I might hyper ventilate the next time!

Yeah ... I know what you mean. When I could get NOTHING, I was ready to ask someone if they'd paid the bill. Then I tried the Dish TV, and it wasn't working either. So I started tracing cables.

deb

[DTV-Engineer]

We hosted the Beth Moore Simulcast last August (I think it was). The audio quality was terrible... serious distortion especially during the music. Video was poor-to-fair; it probably looked okay on a 19" TV, but just doesn't cut it on a 12' wide projection screen. What bothered me most was that when I called CCN's technical contact number, the folks there seemed to have no idea that anything was wrong and had no clue what to do about it.

We are scheduled to do this again this August, and I don't want a repeat of last year's fiasco. Obviously, the production truck at the live venue is originating broadcast-quality standard definition video, if not high definition. The satellite truck is doubtless uplinking this feed at broadcast quality bit rates. But CCN is receiving it at their headquarters and re-encoding it at a very low bitrate to fit on their DSS service. Ugh!

What I really want is to find out what satellite the venue uplink is using, and use a professional receiver to downlink it myself... and use the crappy CCN feed as a last resort backup. One of these days I need to investigate this... if it comes down to it, I'll see about renting the station's satellite truck (I double as one of the uplink operators)...

Never again do I want to be the lone guy in a room full of disgruntled women!

-- Jeff